by Joan He
Like Celia, she wore no antiskin.
This wasn’t the island. Wasn’t shielded. A gurney rattled by them, bearing a body covered by a sheet, and Kasey’s mouth dried. “Where’s your antiskin?” she asked the medic.
“Ran out.” Then the medic turned her attention back to the crew—“One tour, that’s it”—but the crew’s attention had swiveled to Actinium. Everyone stared as he unzipped and stepped out of his antiskin.
He placed the protective gear into the medic’s hands.
The cam swung back to Kasey before she could recover. The unspoken cue lingered.
I’d never put you in danger, Actinium had promised. So had Ekaterina. You won’t be exposed. But vows were human constructs. They died out here, in the wilderness.
Kasey should have been prepared.
She took off her antiskin, flesh crawling as it came into contact with air. Her biomonitor warned her of the toxins entering her system. Only for a little while, she told herself.
Just this once.
Meridian started to unzip hers.
Just one swim.
Her fingers, Kasey noticed, were shaking.
One more trip—
“Don’t.”
The boom and camera swung Kasey’s way.
“We’re being filmed,” Meridian muttered beneath her breath. Kasey didn’t care. She was well aware of the price she and Actinium would have to pay to make others do the same. But Meridian didn’t have to be caught in the crosshairs, and Kasey was relieved when the medic interrupted them.
“We done here?” The medic strode down the tar walkway and shouted “Come on!” when they lagged. “I don’t have all day!”
They followed the medic into the arm of a ward, the narrow path tiled with cardboard and deconstructed crates. PVC strips, held together with duct tape, formed the walls around them, rippling as they walked. The air grew acrid with the smell of waste, human and chemical, and Kasey, who’d barely survived stratum-22, was woozy by the time they reached a series of plasterboard doors set into the walls, leading presumably to patient rooms. In the back of her mind, she understood she couldn’t face other humans like this. If she vomited on camera, it’d completely undo the point of the visit.
“Wait—” she started to say to the medic, and broke off at the bang. It came from one of the plasterboard doors as it fell down and a man burst out, a bundle in his arms.
He ran straight into the wall.
The PVC rippled, absorbing the impact. But Kasey couldn’t absorb what she was seeing. She stared as the man rammed into the PVC again, as if expecting it to yield. The duct tape held.
And so he turned, and charged toward them instead.
“Don’t engage!” shouted the medic.
Meridian flattened against the wall. Kasey stumbled to the side.
Actinium didn’t move. His head snapped up when the man was almost upon him.
His fist cocked back.
Later, Kasey would try to sequence the memory. The initiation. The escalation. What came first—the punch that slammed into the man’s face, causing the bundle to tumble from his arms, or the knife, flashing in the man’s hand? But this moment, like everything else about the trip, would resist her. It followed no order but nature’s disorder.
Meridian screamed. The medic cursed, and called for guards. Two ran in and tackled the man as Kasey ran to Actinium and tried to hold him back. He wrestled in her grip. She wasn’t prepared for his resistance—or his elbow, the bony end bucking free and swinging into her nose.
The gush was immediate. Warm. Kasey let go. Her attention fractured to the bundle on the floor—antiskins, scattered and now splattered with red—then to the cowering crew, cameras still rolling, and through the blood pooling in her mouth, she managed to shout, “Cut!”
• • •
The medic wouldn’t even look her in the eye when she handed Kasey gauze for her nose.
Meridian had been hysterical. “Are you sick?” she’d screamed at Actinium. “He was stealing some antiskins! Big deal!”
Actinium hadn’t said anything. He looked as he did now: head bowed as he sat on the crated-bench, hair fallen out of its carefully combed style, a visor around his eyes, each hand a fist over his knees, knuckles blanched while Meridian railed.
“Meridian . . . please,” Kasey had said, which provoked Meridian more.
“Oh, so I’m the problem now?”
She’d stormed off. Maybe Kasey should have followed her, and left Actinium alone, but something compelled her to sit beside him on the bench. She’d stayed until her nose stopped gushing five minutes later, though the silence didn’t break, and she couldn’t find a way to wipe the blood from his shirt so it, too, stayed. Red against white, like when he’d smashed the glass, except then, Actinium had been in perfect control. This time, she’d seen something rabid in his eyes. Had the chaos of their surroundings infected him? Or was this who he really was?
“You need to tell me the truth,” she finally said. A message came from Ekaterina. She ignored it. She’d tried to be as motionless as Actinium, as if sharing his stillness could allow her to share his state of mind, but he was a black box to her. “Who are you?” she pressed when he didn’t reply.
Why is it that I can trust you one moment, and be hurt by you the next?
Silence. Then, in a voice that rasped: “I think you already know. Say it,” he ordered, when she did not.
Kasey swallowed. The sound boomed in her ears. “Andre Cole.”
“A dead person.”
“You never got on the copterbot.” Kasey adopted the same pose as Actinium, her hands on her knees and eyes to the ground. Her voice dropped. “You built a bot.”
The departure footage had given it away. When Ester dropped her purse before boarding the copterbot, Andre Cole hadn’t moved. Not even to blink. Reactions to novel situations. The hardest bit of programming to get right. No wonder Actinium hadn’t been repulsed by her violation of the Ester Act; he’d beaten her to it. Constructed his model with a degree of finesse that was admirable, even if his deception was not.
“A dead person who violated his parents’ act,” Actinium revised. His gaze was still hidden from her when Kasey glanced over. “Doesn’t that disturb you?”
“No,” she admitted. “Not as much as you not appearing in any of my sister’s memories.” She drew in a sharp breath. Her nose throbbed. “Why?”
Why did you lie?
For a long time, Actinium did not answer. “My intentions shouldn’t matter.”
Logically, they shouldn’t have. Intentions, good or bad, didn’t impact people. Consequences did. It was the consequences of someone’s actions, well-intentioned or not, that’d killed Celia.
But Kasey wanted to know. It defied logic. Caring for Actinium, despite the high probability he’d lied to her in other ways too, defied logic. “How did this world wrong you?”
“In the same way it wronged your sister.”
“The crash was an accident.”
They’d shared silences before. Comfortable ones. Pained ones.
This silence was humid, a calm before the storm.
“An accident.” Actinium’s shoulders began to shake. Kasey tensed; she wasn’t good with tears. Then he lifted his head, and she realized he hadn’t been crying at all.
“That’s what my parents would have wanted you to think.” His lips were slashed between a laugh and a wince, his black eyes aglow with pain. “No, Mizuhara. Call it for what it was: murder.”
DISBELIEF. GRIEF. ANGER. SHOCK. BY the time I run every emotion programmed into me, the timer on the pod is down to 191 HR 07 MIN 31 S.
How many days is that? I do the math. Easily. Mentally. My vision swims as I notice these things that make me . . . not me.
In 7.96355 days, the pod will stop functioning. Everyone will be doomed, trapped forever in stasis, but first to die will be the person I pushed. Not my sister, I tell myself, when I finally get to my feet and back away. Not Kay. Kay wouldn�
��t want me to die for her. Wouldn’t want to kill me, like Hero, except it’s incomparable, because Hero had no awareness over his actions. No control. Kay is in perfect control—of herself, and of me. She designed me so that I would have no choice over my own life, no dignity in my own death.
Realizing that is what ultimately gives me the strength to walk away.
I leave the facility, determined and undaunted by the prospect of surfacing from the bottom of the ocean and swimming back to the island. Or so I tell myself. Because I swim too fast, like I’m scared that I might regret my decision, and the more I try to escape, the more my body numbs and the line between my consciousness and my . . . programming blurs and the memories slip back in even though they aren’t mine; I don’t want—
• • •
Back at the dome.
• • •
Back at the surface.
• • •
Back at the dome, in the dome, standing before the stasis pod, the timer glowing on its door.
164 HR 18 MIN 59 S
6.84651, my mind thinks, before I wrench it—and my body—away, run before both are overtaken again.
• • •
Back at the surface.
This time I go slow. Every stroke hurts. It feels like I’m swimming through stone.
Sunrise, sunset, sunrise.
Five days left now.
I’m so tired.
So weak.
Am I hallucinating when I see land? Or—worse—am I’m really back at the dome and I can’t trust the optics of my mind?
No, I’m on the shore. This grittiness—it’s sand.
I collapse on it, boneless. Brainless. I could pass out. But I didn’t come this far just to let my unconscious regain command.
I make myself stand.
I’m back on the island, and I’ve never been happier. I spot the house—and energize when I remember who’s in it.
That energy curdles to unease when I enter the kitchen. Dust coats the countertops. How long has it been? I recall my excruciating swim. Two days to return to the island on my final attempt, but factor in all the time I lost in between and the time it took reach the dome in the first place and that means—
“I’ve been gone for five days.”
“Agree,” says U-me, rolling out from the living room.
Five days, Hero’s been tied up.
He’s conscious when I enter M.M.’s bedroom. A recent development, I pray. Even if he doesn’t need food or water to survive, he doesn’t know that, and it’s not even worth asking if he’s okay. Who would be, after being bound to a bed for five days? Unable to meet his eye, I focus on untying him, the task made harder because his wrists and ankles have swelled around the rope, and as I struggle, he poses the question on me instead.
“Are you okay?”
His voice is soft as ever. My fingers stop, and I make the mistake of looking at him. Under his sky-colored gaze, I feel translucent. I wonder if he can see the murderer under my skin—the girl who killed him and the girl who, in the coming days, will also kill her so-called sister.
I wonder if he would flinch away from my touch if he knew what these hands could do.
But when Hero says, “I’m guessing I tried to kill you again,” I remember I’m all alone in knowing our place in the universe has forever changed. This boy is no longer the biggest threat to my existence. The truth is so much more sinister.
And my first instinct is to shield Hero from it. “No, love. You didn’t do anything like that.”
The lie comes easily. Have I done it before? Lied to protect someone I care about? Or would that be Celia? Who am I? Celia, or Cee?
“Then . . .” Hero trails off, trying to make sense of his circumstances.
“What did I say?” I attack the knots with newfound resolve. “I like it kinky.”
I undo the final knot. The ropes fall, and Hero grimaces as he flexes his wrists. His pain pains me, and to my alarm, I find I still have tears left to cry. At my sniff, Hero glances up. “Cee?” Before he can ask me what’s wrong, I silence him with a kiss. I swallow his questions, my tears, and relish the way he said my name—not as a letter, or the third iteration of some experiment. C-E-E, I remember spelling out for him. Pronounced like the sea outside that window. From the start, he said it as if I were real. I am real, I decide. I’m Cee. Not Celia, as much a stranger to me as Kay. I don’t need either of them. I can be happy with myself. Live for myself, in service of no one else.
Or, at least, live for the people who actually care about me.
“Are you okay?” Hero asks again, breaking the kiss first—breaking it, I think, just to ask. Concern shines upon his face, held between my hands. His rise to cover mine. “What happened?”
He doesn’t ask, Why are you back? But I hear the question anyway, and suddenly feel like I’ve let him down. He was rooting for me, the only one of us with memories, to succeed. Get off this island. Find my sister. Fulfill my cosmic destiny. He doesn’t know, of course, that humans manufactured our fates. And he never has to know. I won’t hurt him the way not-Kay hurt me. We are as real as we believe ourselves to be.
“You were right.” I draw his right hand, still wrapped around mine, to me and kiss his knuckles. “There’s nothing to find out there.”
THAT COULDN’T BE RIGHT.
Murder. The copterbot had been autopiloted, its only passengers Genevie and the Coles. The destination coordinates had glitched midway through the flight. It was a malfunction—“a technical error,” Kasey said to Actinium. His frigid laughter died.
He got to his feet.
Walked down the makeshift hall.
However crude, the PVC walls still offered some protection from microcinogens and radioaxons, levels of which rose as Kasey followed Actinium outside. Her biomonitor beeped, its warning consumed by the cacophony of trauma and triage around them, but even that faded as they walked onward.
They stopped at a drop-off at the edge of the hospel clearing. A silt sink suctioned away the land below.
“Human.” Actinium’s voice was as dark as the surrounding night. “A human error, not technical.”
Kasey waited for him to explain. “What happened?” she asked when he didn’t.
“More or less what happened here. A megaquake. Victims, desperate for relief.” He pocketed his hands. “They mistook the copterbot for a supply plane. Their hackers tried to redirect it to their village.” A shrug-like pause. “Failed, evidently.”
His nonchalance belied the weight of the disclosure.
How do you know? another person might have asked, but Kasey trusted his ability to hack any info he so desired, even if she couldn’t trust him. The real question was: “Why doesn’t the rest of the world know?”
“The event was cognicized from the minds of involved parties.”
“That’s not—”
“It was in their wills. My parents’. Your mother’s. They knew the risks accompanying their line of work.” Off his tongue, their line of work sounded like a euphemism for something awful instead of the philanthropy it was. “They understood any outside-territory accident, so to speak, would be used to impede humanitarian progress and give ammunition to political opponents of HOME.”
“And the bot?” Was that a preventative measure, too? Had the principled Ester Cole flouted her own beliefs about the separation of humans and bots to protect her son from these relief trips?
“My doing,” Actinium said simply. “I was trying to make a point. After the trip.”
The sentence ended there. He made it sound deliberate. But Kasey heard the catch to his voice. He’d meant to go on, but couldn’t. After the trip—
He would have shown his mother that bots were no different than humans.
Kasey didn’t know what to say. She was bad at comforting people—so rarely did she understand their pain—but now she understood. Intimately. An innocent experiment, he’d conducted, with ramifications beyond his imagination. It was like Kasey’s own st
ory, except eviction didn’t come close to being left, in the span of one night, as the only Cole alive. The confusion he must have felt. The paranoia and, worst of all, the helplessness.
Helplessness crushed Kasey now. “Actinium—”
He cut her off. “I don’t need your pity. Just you.”
You. As in Kasey.
As in, he needed Kasey.
Kasey, and not Celia.
Impossible. Unthinkable, more so than Actinium not appearing in Celia’s memories, which reminded Kasey—“Celia—”
“Came to me. Asked for her Intraface to be destroyed. I never lied to you.”
It couldn’t be. Celia—Kasey—but—the island—the shield. “Leona?” Kasey sputtered, brain short-circuiting.
“What about her?”
“How do you know her, if not through Celia?”
An intake of breath. “Leona’s my aunt, Mizuhara.”
Aunt. It took Kasey a second to see. Not the resemblance—they looked nothing alike—but the pieces. How they fit into this new equation. The shield, from Actinium. The teachbot—a gift, Leona had said, from my sister. Ester Cole, whose unit Celia liked for the same reasons she liked house on the shore. The furniture was degradable. Impermanent. The floor bore scuff marks like scars. It was loved, Celia would’ve said.
Love. A funny emotion. Surely it’d have driven Leona to insist that Actinium live with her. If she knew he was alive, that was. Had he modified his face like his ID? Had he grown close to Leona under a guise, like he had with Kasey? Why? Kasey crossed her arms, hugging herself. Why me ? To go through such lengths, just to approach her. The thought agitated her, felt like more of a betrayal than Actinium concealing his true identity.
“What did you tell Leona?” she demanded before her mind could spiral deeper.
“That I’d escaped an attempt on my life.”
An accident. Not an attempt. Unintentional.